The integration of multiple linguistic modules – syntax, semantics and pragmatics – poses a persistent challenge for adult second language (L2) learners, as posited by the interface hypothesis (IH). This study examines how crosslinguistic influence impacts L2 learners’ acquisition and processing of Korean quotative constructions at the syntax–semantics–pragmatics interface. Using offline acceptability judgment and online self-paced reading tasks, we compared Japanese- and Chinese-speaking learners of Korean. The results revealed that Japanese-speaking learners outperformed Chinese-speaking learners in offline tasks, demonstrating native-like sensitivity to case-marking constraints, likely due to the structural similarities between Japanese and Korean. However, neither learner group exhibited sensitivity to case-marking violations during real-time processing, unlike native Korean speakers. These findings suggest a dissociation between explicit knowledge and online processing abilities, supporting the IH and emphasizing the persistent challenges of integrating multiple linguistic domains in L2 processing. This study underscores the role of crosslinguistic influence in facilitating explicit knowledge acquisition while revealing its limitations in fostering native-like automaticity in online processing.

This article examines the contributions of Bert Bolin, the first chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to the collective understanding of the panel’s nature, operations and results, as well as his efforts to safeguard the credibility of the IPCC process in the face of criticism. Based on the scholarship on expertise and its relationship with the political process, I argue that Bolin’s contribution to that process can be summarized in three points. First, he acted as a mediator between producers of climate change knowledge and its users, in this case governments and corporations. Second, he selected and emphasized some of the information provided by the IPCC and used it to advocate for immediate action to tackle climate change. Third, he played a major role in legitimizing the IPCC as the best possible assessment organization, especially through boundary work. Additionally, it is suggested that Bolin’s role in the advisory process was not static but changed within an evolving political and social context. Through this case study, I aim to contribute to the scholarship that examines how environmental problems are defined and brought into the political arena, and the role of experts in this complex process.

All societies throughout time have shown a greater or lesser degree of superstition when facing the traumatic event of death. Roman society was no exception, especially when numerous religious currents participated in the funerary rituals, sharing their own conception and beliefs. The following lines present a brief overview of children’s death, especially premature ones, from the early Imperial to the late Imperial period, when they became more highly regarded. It is followed by the traumatic or marginal deaths of some individuals whose behaviour, illnesses or ways of dying were suspicious for their closest people: the article closes with the treatment given to certain women. All the deaths in this research aroused suspicions among their relatives or the authorities, who did not hesitate to practise rituals to calm them in the afterlife and ensure that they did not return to life as evil spirits. In this article we will focus on the practices that developed in the city of Onoba and its hinterland or influential area; a Roman colony located in the westernmost part of the province of Baetica, a port city of enormous importance for the Empire given its importance as a gateway for minerals coming from the Urium mines.

This paper examines the complex political-economic processes that shape contemporary forced displacement from Guatemala to the U.S. The study was driven by the following research question: How does capitalism and the historical context of forced migration in Guatemala relate to the creation and development of migrant-led organizations in the U.S. and the various types of leadership and political participation? Examining the political economy of Guatemalan migration to the Greater Los Angeles region and the activities of migrants and community organizations, I argue that neoliberal capitalism not only provokes the displacement of Guatemalan migrants as a social class of people from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, but it has also contributed to the emergence of distinct political Guatemalan diaspora organizations in the U.S. at the community, national, and transnational level. Furthermore, due to historical social relations in Guatemala, organizations have emerged in Southern California along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. Moreover, activism emerges within destination countries because exploitation and exclusion take on distinct forms beyond the specific economic and political forces that generate displacement in migrants’ origin countries. As such, these organizations have made significant contributions by safeguarding the human rights of Guatemalan migrants in the U.S. and have emerged based on the differences and inequalities faced by indigenous communities compared to non-indigenous (mestizo/ladino) groups as they and their organizations endure processes of “exclusionary inclusion” in the U.S.

Scholarship on Roman political thought and its legacy, especially anglophone, has rapidly expanded over the last decade. The main drivers of this renewed attention to Roman political ideas and institutions are an historical interest in the collapse of the Roman republic; a philosophical interest in republicanism; and a growing sensitivity to the originality of Roman thinkers, especially Cicero, in contrast to the older view that they were simply derivative of the Greeks. In this essay I will discuss recent publications on Cicero and Roman political ideas. After offering an overview of key themes in this new scholarship, I seek to suggest promising directions for future research and encourage the growing interest in Roman political thought and Cicero in particular. Cicero provides a fascinating link between ideas, institutions and action on the ground and he is therefore with good reason at the centre of much of the rapidly expanding literature on Roman political thought. In addition, given his interest in developing a theory of justice as the foundation of the state (res publica), a focus on Cicero will help explore the legacy of republicanism from the angle of his ideas about justice while paying attention to scholarship placing these ideas into their historical and institutional context.

After the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU) issued new domestic rules across a variety of financial services. Different politics and policy-making processes generated regulatory incompatibilities, and conflicts emerged as each side insisted the other adapt to its approach. Yet our original data covering eleven sub-sectors show that in a predominant cluster of cases, the two jurisdictions had by 2020 made adjustments and adopted integrationist regulation, which fosters cross-jurisdictional interoperability for financial companies through harmonization (increasing similarity and compatibility) or deference (accepting the regulation of other jurisdictions). The pattern has broad and surprising implications for the future of global finance in an era of rising economic nationalism and populist politics. Why, then, did Washington and Brussels move beyond the standoffs? What accounts for the integrationist turn? Our novel explanation features a “mutual accommodation” causal mechanism driven by the development in both jurisdictions of “border-policing” capacities, builds on a new generation of IPE research that is attentive to complexity and temporal process in accounting for global governance outcomes, and provides a pathway for qualitative researchers seeking to balance many new methodological and transparency demands.

We present the flexible delivery of picosecond laser pulses with up to 20 W average power over a 3-m-long sample of anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (AR-HCF) for laser-micromachining applications. Our experiments highlight the importance of optical-mode purity of the AR-HCF for manufacturing precision. We demonstrate that compared with an AR-HCF sample with a capillary to core (d/D) ratio of approximately 0.5, the AR-HCF with a d/D ratio of approximately 0.68 exhibits better capability of high-order-mode suppression, giving rise to improved micromachining quality. Moreover, the AR-HCF delivery system exhibits better pointing stability and setup flexibility than the free-space beam delivery system. These results pave the way to practical applications of AR-HCF in developing advanced equipment for ultrafast laser micromachining.

The “revolutionary script” of Leninism was foundational to how the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) and Amilcar Cabral imagined the course of decolonization. Under-utilized archives and party documents highlight that the impact of the political-organizational model of Lenin was an early source of inspiration for PAIGC leaders, a fact which historians have not investigated in detail. The manner in which Leninism influenced the PAIGC was neither linear nor dogmatic, however. Dating from early exposure to Marxist texts in underground study circles to aborted attempts at launching armed struggle, party leaders constantly improvised upon the script with which they based their anti-colonial revolution.

Care theorists have had enough. Decades of neoliberalism, followed by financial crisis, austerity, gender backlash, and, in 2020, a worldwide infectious disease pandemic, have clearly tested their patience. The titles alone of three recent books on the ethics and politics of care suggest a change in tone; indeed, “radical,” “revolutionary,” and “manifesto” are generally not words we associate with the scholarship of those interested in the everyday practices of responding to the needs of others. And yet for Maurice Hamington, Lynne Segal, and co-authors Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson, these quotidian practices, and the ethos that underlies them, are more radical than they seem. Indeed, these volumes suggest that a commitment to care—a commitment that is both ideational/ethical and material—is necessary to usher in the kind of politics we so desperately need today. It could be, then, that with their latest books, these authors are edifying and formalizing what we might call the “radical turn” in research on care—a turn that can be roughly said to have begun in 2020 with the Care Collective’s The Care Manifesto (Verso) and the parallel Care Manifesto (Femnet) written by and for women of Africa, Asia, and Latin America a year later.

One common approach to solve multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) problems is to extend conventional Q-learning by using vector Q-values in combination with a utility function. However issues can arise with this approach in the context of stochastic environments, particularly when optimising for the scalarised expected reward (SER) criterion. This paper extends prior research, providing a detailed examination of the factors influencing the frequency with which value-based MORL Q-learning algorithms learn the SER-optimal policy for an environment with stochastic state transitions. We empirically examine several variations of the core multi-objective Q-learning algorithm as well as reward engineering approaches and demonstrate the limitations of these methods. In particular, we highlight the critical impact of the noisy Q-value estimates issue on the stability and convergence of these algorithms.

In this article, we examine the determinants of citizens’ democratic preferences in federal states with politically significant national or linguistic diversity. Using original survey data from Belgium, Canada and Switzerland, we test whether members of national or linguistic minorities prefer different (electoral, direct or deliberative) forms of decision-making than majority members – since some give advantage to them more than others. While we find effects of citizens’ objective and subjective minority-majority position on their democratic preferences, individual-level predictors such as satisfaction with the current functioning of democracy, economic well-being and political ideology remain at least as strong predictors. These findings enrich the literatures on democratic fatigue, reform and innovation by showing that even in states with significant national-linguistic diversity, democratic preferences seem to transcend communities, indicating room for cross-group consensus. Yet, since group-level factors have some relevance, democratic reforms need to pay attention to them to be inclusive of all societal segments.

Over the past two decades, political science has produced varied examples of ethnographic approaches. These approaches have not only tackled epistemological dilemmas but also exposed a second methodological dimension of ethnographic practice that is not so systematically explored: the relationship of researchers to their research participants. In this article, we focus on this second dimension, using emblematic texts in political science, especially in comparative politics, to develop a fourfold typology of political ethnographies that takes into account the emotional dynamics between researchers and participants. We use this typology to analyze various gradations through which these emotional dynamics develop in fieldwork. Focusing on the navigation between distance and proximity that these dynamics entail, we propose the concept of “emotional proximity” to capture relations between the researcher and the participant. We investigate the validity of this novel typology by applying it to ethnographic studies of far-right actors. The political distance separating researchers and participants in these studies allows us to investigate the methodologies of disconnecting political from emotional dynamics across this fourfold schema of ethnographic varieties. We argue that the “infidelity” of emotional distance (instead of proximity) is not an objectivist epistemological necessity but a methodological tool that is indispensable to the practice of participant observation.

In natural speech, phonetic cues that distinguish lexical items can be hyperarticulated when there is a minimal pair competitor, a process known as contrastive hyperarticulation. Building upon prior work, this article examines the cue-specific nature of contrastive hyperarticulation in Japanese, focussing on stop voice onset time (VOT) using a speech corpus. We confirmed that the existence of a voicing minimal pair competitor in the lexicon triggers hyperarticulation of VOT duration on the target segment (shorter for voiced stops and longer for voiceless stops), while other contrasts (singleton vs. geminate) did not. The results also suggest that contrastive hyperarticulation (a) is more compatible with casual speech than slow/clear speech, (b) is sensitive to position in a word (greater in word-initial position than in non-initial position) and (c) applies to a greater degree in Japanese than in English due to properties of stops. This provides further evidence that the phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation is cross-linguistically relevant.

Tell settlements often provide a unique window into prehistoric lifeways due to remarkable preservation and safeguarding from modern disturbances. Vésztő-Mágor in Hungary is one such tell with stratigraphy, features and finds that reflect thousands of years of prehistoric settlement. In 2021, the Vésztő-Mágor Conservation and Exhibition Program began the work of stabilizing, documenting and preserving prehistoric deposits, features and artefacts exposed in an in situ exhibition trench at Vésztő-Mágor. In the process, an exceptionally well-preserved carbonized item was discovered embedded in a series of Middle Bronze Age house floors. We describe the object and context of discovery, and interpret it as matting inside a wattle-and-daub house. We expand our discussion to similar contexts known from Vésztő-Mágor, in the Carpathian Basin, and beyond, to highlight the technologies involving organic materials used at prehistoric tell sites and their significance for understanding lifeways at these settlements.